Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) Passive Optical Network (PON) is a recently developed network technology for meeting the rapidly increasing traffic demands caused by the popularization of Internet and spouting of bandwidth-demanding applications. The inherent high cost of multi-wavelength provision may hinder the deployment of WDM PON. As compared to Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) PON, WDM PON may be associated with additional capital expenditure in enabling remote nodes, transmitters, and receivers with multi-wavelength provision capability. The multi-wavelength provision is one parameter in determining the capacity of WDM PON architecture. Specifically, the capacity of a PON system may depend on the network architecture, wavelength supporting capability of optical devices, as well as data rate of the source generators and receivers.
The present disclosure appreciates that there are several limitations with designing WDM PONs. For example, there are three major classes of optical source generators, depending on the wavelengths generation capability, i.e., wavelength-specified sources, wavelength-tunable sources, and multi-wavelength sources. These three classes of optical sources may each have different wavelength supporting ability and different costs. Moreover, service providers may desire to determine, prior to deployment, capacity and cost comparisons in order to maximize their capital investment returns.